Male face wip, hair advice?
polycounter lvl 2
I've been working on this bust for a couple weeks, purpose is to learn Marmoset and make a game folio piece as I recently made redundant, and I've been neglecting my folio because I thought I was safe. Hah.
The Zbrush sculpt took 4 days, learning Marmoset 1 day, the face was quick because I already had a low poly version lying around... but the hair. I've been iterating a lot. I'm admittedly hampered by crappy hardware, and I think, I hope, I'm almost there... but it's taking too long. I need some professional advice. What should I do differently? Thanks.
The Zbrush sculpt took 4 days, learning Marmoset 1 day, the face was quick because I already had a low poly version lying around... but the hair. I've been iterating a lot. I'm admittedly hampered by crappy hardware, and I think, I hope, I'm almost there... but it's taking too long. I need some professional advice. What should I do differently? Thanks.
Replies
Looking forward to seeing more!
This is my liqui-paintover of what I'd do, personally.
I lightened the upper lids, as they were fairly black, leading to a feminine appearance.
I widened the jaw and narrowed the cheeks a little to square up the head, again to make it more masculine.
Lastly, I filled in volume of the hair where I'd just sculpt a mass, and then lay cards on top, rather than trying to build the entire hairstyle with transparent patches.
But I do agree that the hair is bewilderingly Matte, and a bit thin.
With the smaller cards, maybe try to make sure they're all following the flow of the hair, covering up the holes that let you see through them from different angles, and cutting through each other as infrequently as humanly possible. Generally breaks the illusion of them being strands rather than cards.
I'm kinda assuming you've seen this already when learning marmoset, but this goes through shader set up for characters super nicely. http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/character-setup You might be able to squeeze some more usefulness out of it in regards to the hair.
And just one last little thing that's irking me a tad... His eyes don't have any blood vessles or red creeping in around the sides at all. Makes them look kinda fake. The eyes on the Marmo Character setup guide have it right.
But all that said I'm just nitpicking, lol. amazing work, absolutely love it and looking forward to seeing more. Good luck in the job hunt!
Is this better? I added a hair mass, added more cards, kept them closer to the main mass, and made the ends of the alpha thinner, to get a little softer effect. I also increased the specularity and gloss, and darkened the diffuse. I tried anisotropic, but it looks bad.
I'm not sure if you can tell, but I'm going for a slightly dishevelled look, maybe not recently washed, kind of thing.
It's not everyday where I find myself saying "OMG" out-loud to a WIP. Your work is amazing!
Edit: Just out of curiosity, are you "Steven Stahlberg"?
It'd be nice to see a breakdown of your workflow once it's over. Keep it up!
Workflow, let's see, I started in Maya with an existing bust, it was animateable at first but I found it was slowing me down to tip-toe around, trying to keep history, so I 'baked' it towards the end. Second was a ZBrush sculpt, now since I didn't want to redo the lowres from scratch the sculpt doesn't look that great, I focused mainly on detail, it took only 4 days. The hair is very rough, the neck is too long (this was a female bust originally), things like that...
then I baked the normals, cavity and AO in XNormal. I already had textures also from before, but reworked them extensively, among other things I used a beard texture and a couple face textures from 3d.sk. I ended up hardly using the AO and cavity at all. I found a hair texture on google, and after getting the Diffuse texture to final I used it to trace out the alpha, and to make the spec and the normal (the XNormal Photoshop filter).
Back into Maya for the beard and hair. Beard was quick, I lucked out and got it right immediately, the hair was a whole different ballgame.
Then back and forth between Maya, Photoshop and Marmoset for a long time, probably taking the longest chunk of time.
tho i think this cute flat nose that be from on of your famous female characters could use some more depth. its really cute in the side view, too cute for a guy. i think it might not hurt to go a bit further away from that stereotype you developed years ago (and which i love)
I'll be following this thread closely.
On a personal level, I may have let out a bit of squeal when I realized that you're Steven Stalhberg and you're using Marmoset Toolbag.
Although I tend to favour abit of nitty gritty.
But sweet stuff otherwise
I agree about the skin, I keep trying to push the contrast on the skin, but I don't notice much changes. I even overlaid an 80 year old man's nose and cheeks on top, raised the contrast, copied and desaturated, contrasted, in Overlay Mode, I even hand-painted a couple veins and spots, it didn't seem to do much. I guess I just need to double down on all that.
I'll keep tweaking the hair.
And, I really love Marmoset - never used a software that was easier to get into.
I'm sad you're changing the nose, I liked it. Gave him a bit of a different look.
I do agree with the comments that the character is looking to clean for his own good.
Also to be super nit-picky I think the hair could use some more work too. You need some more hair-cards for different sections.
For instance, having some transition cards (small break up alphas ) to help the transition between skin-geo and full hair-card would really help the illusion of the hair. I really like how you the overall hair cards seem to clump up on the head. I can sorta see groups of hair within the cards much like in real life. You could also some have stray alpha cards for random hairs to break up the silhouette.
You could also apply the same technique to the beard too. As of right now, your beard seems really thin and linear. One technique would be to create groups of hair just like you did on your head. But with the smaller beard cards, to create the cluster of hair/beard groups.
nice work! oh and super cool comic by the way!
I don#t think it is that much about pulling it out more, but the opposite is would help i think. pull the back of his nose (don't know the right english word) further in. It will not change the face from the front but make his face overall more caucasian male. At least thats how he reads to me
the asians call us longnoses for a reason
the new updates are cool, but i am not sure what to make of that one strand that breaks it, it doesn't really look like a bad strand that doesn't want to follow his hairstyle. it just feels oddly placed, not naturally growing that way.
You mean the strand on his left, top of the forehead? I agree it's a bit unnatural, see what I can do.
sometimes i cant believe whats possible with this times engines...